We all know that AI is the biggest buzzword since the invention of the internet…but the irony is that people — and entrepreneurs — are approaching this new craze in a completely different way. Think about it: Back when the dot-com boom emerged, there was no scarcity mindset around the need to invent your own internet. Instead, people had the foresight and open-mindedness to realize the internet was a conduit to opportunity and an enabler, rather than an economic divisor that narrowed the options for success to a select few.
With AI, it's just the opposite: People seem to feel that AI has made the entrepreneurial landscape smaller with the payouts limited to fewer benefactors, rather than more.
In summary, the new narrative has outlined two ways to win:
- Develop the next better AI
- Create something AI-powered and be the best (and only) winner in your space
I'm going to cut through the B.S. right now and share my unpopular (but I think common sensical) perspective: AI has not created a zero-sum game, and in order to profit handsomely in the age of AI, the most lucrative opportunities with a real shot at success (greater than 0.00001%) aren't either of the two limited strategies. Instead, there's a third and much more abundant opportunity that many entrepreneurs can monetize, and it doesn't require huge capital expenditures, VC fundraising, or a team of technical geniuses for a seat at the table.
If you're petrified with the fear of entrepreneurial extinction because you haven't beat the handful of trillionaires to create the one AI to rule them all, have no fear. You may have one more shot at riding their wave before UBI comes to your rescue — and if you start soon, you won't need that UBI handout at all.
The Difference Between AI, AI-Powered, AI-Enabled, and AI-Adjacent
First, let's define a few things, because as someone who's currently building an AI-enabled business, I think semantics are pretty important and severely misunderstood right about now.
To call out the obvious, AI itself is artificial intelligence, and if you're building a new artificial intelligence model to replace one of the current options, then sure, you'd be an inventor of AI. You'd also be pretty ballsy and I'm guessing overflowing with technical expertise and funding or else you're probably fighting an uphill battle that very few have the time, money, talent, or resources to execute.
Now that we got that one out of the way, let's enter the realm of confusion that has investors angry or scammed, founders sounding like idiots or con-artists, and the non-technical public at large completely mystified and unaware. AI-powered indicates that you're building something for which artificial intelligence plays a vital role in propelling. In other words, AI should be the generating force behind the key and primary use case of your product or service in order to deem it "AI-powered", and thus, without AI, it would be nonexistent.
Lately, investors have been losing patience and making their blacklists over founders presenting startups as AI-powered that are truly AI-enabled. AI-enabled simply means that you're utilizing AI for some purpose in your venture, but AI isn't comprising the key role, and without AI, the venture could still exist, though perhaps a bit less efficiently or profitably. For example, I'm currently building a physical product DTC company that some people might define as "AI-enabled" based on how we've used AI in the product development; that said, I don't really need to mention AI at all when I pitch our product to investors or consumers, since the AI involvement is a tangential minor factor, not the key value proposition.
Finally, let's talk about the fourth group, which is where I see significant underrated future opportunity: AI-adjacent. AI-adjacent, or AI-aligned, businesses are ones that grow alongside AI, yet they don't necessarily use AI at all. These are the ventures I implore the AI-curious but not-so-technical or resource-constrained entrepreneurs to consider because I believe there's a goldmine at their fingertips if they have the foresight to reach out and grab it.
The Coming AI Flood (The 100x Opportunity it Creates Isn't What You Think)
AI isn't just creating tools; it's creating choice overload at a level consumers have never experienced. Every category will soon have (conservatively):
- 100x more products
- 100x more competitors
- 100x more software tools
- 100x more startups
- 100x more pitches, courses, templates, prompts, and workflows
- 100x more people claiming expertise they don't actually have
When the cost of creating a product approaches zero, the number of products in the world approaches infinity — and infinite options is a terrible experience for the average consumer.
Sure, options mean more choices for consumers and in theory, more choices mean more freedom. In reality, though, analysis paralysis sets in, and consumers actually suffer from this never-before-seen degree of production. This is where the new 100x opportunity comes in, and just like the advice to "zig when everyone else zags", this opportunity means doing the opposite of contributing to the infinite entry competition. The opportunity I'm talking about is helping consumers sift through the surplus and quickly, effectively arrive at the best option for their specific use case.
Think of it as being a highly credible, niche-specific recommender that saves consumers time, helps them achieve the best possible outcome, and helps the best AI meet its ideal consumer match. Call it AI-consumer matchmaking or the next level of affiliate and referral marketing and commissioned sales, but however you define it, this is how to hop onto the AI rocket ship and win with AI, rather than compete against it.
The Solution to What AI Destroys
Over the last decade, you've already seen the shift from platforms to people, ads to influencers, and conversions from cheap, fast, and easy to expensive, slow, and difficult. Once platforms sold out and allowed overcrowding to muddy the user experience, consumers got annoyed and distrustful. People may still use them, but they don't actually believe them. They scroll, but they don't commit. They see ads, but they don't act on them without a second opinion.
As someone who's built multiple businesses on ads, referrals, and emails, I can tell you ads are the only marketing method we cut out entirely and still multiplied our ROI despite a much smaller budget. User behavior is fracturing, attention is splintering, skepticism is rising, and AI is dumping gasoline on all of it.
Someone has to fill the trust gap between customers and the tidal wave of new products hitting the market. This someone is not the algorithm (erratic much?). Not the platforms (sellouts). Certainly not the brands themselves (talk about bias!).
This is the perfect introduction for the person (or business) that becomes the:
- Most customized filter
- Most objective assessment
- Most reliable interpreter of AI-saturated markets
This is what the next generation of affiliate and referral empires will do. To be clear, you won't succeed in this space by promoting AI products blindly like every influencer with an affiliate link; instead, the real opportunity here is to act as a high-signal, niche-specific advisor for a category of products exploding faster than consumers can process.
A New Industry to Unseat the Old
If you think this is simply affiliate marketing with a focus on AI-specific tools, you've missed the boat. Old affiliate marketing was a numbers game rife with low trust, high volume, SEO hacks, vague product lists, thin content, and "best of" articles written by people who never touched a single product on the list. Oh, and most of that barely works today thanks to AI itself and its hand in deconstructing low-value SEO.
The new industry is built on the opposite principles, since AI makes low-quality content trivial to create. That means the only content that matters now is anchored in:
- Real hands-on testing
- Real niche credibility
- Real customized guidance
- Real category (and operational) understanding
Consumers don't want articles written by AI about AI, and they certainly don't trust them. They want a real, unbiased, but emotionally invested human personality telling them what actually works specifically for their unique use case. And by the way, brands are desperate for this, too. AI will saturate every market with competitors, but it cannot saturate the market with trustworthy distribution partners. That's where high-authority niche-specific referral creators step in.
In terms of the weeds, this new affiliate empire opportunity revolves around three pillars:
- Inside knowledge of a niche: People want experts, not generalists. The narrower the niche, the easier it is to dominate.
- Distribution power: Email lists, communities, review hubs, newsletters, niche YouTube channels, or even a micro-audience with high intent.
- Deal flow: Referrals, rev-share agreements, partner contracts, concierge-style product matching, and high-ticket partnerships beyond simple coupon codes.
This business model requires almost no overhead and scales with trust, not labor. That's why it's a sleeper giant. If you're wondering how this differs from current influencers whose content is peppered with sponsorships, re-read the above, honing in on: Niche-specific, customized, and objective. That's the real leverage position.
What Makes This Opportunity So Explosive
The reason this industry will 100x is simple: The more AI produces, the more consumers will rely on the people who help them avoid making dumb decisions. Every year, the pile of noise grows. Every year, the value of trusted filters increases.
While AI can generate endless products, it cannot effectively trump humans in generating:
- A trustworthy track record
- Real lived experience
- Discernment
AI can't feel, and thus, it can't feel the weight of the consequences of providing a subpar recommendation. It simply can't care, and its words fall flat. The best it can do is apologize and re-generate a new answer. That's where you — and the human ability to actually care — comes in handy as a profitable competitive advantage tech can't yet automate.
Why This Industry Is Perfect for the AI Era
If you're still feeling inferior to all the founders out there pursuing a more technical AI-entrenched venture, let me outline the practical advantages that make this AI-Adjacent opportunity the smarter one on paper:
- It has minimal operational burden.
- No inventory.
- No complex logistics.
- No customer support nightmare.
- No R&D treadmill.
- No rising COGS.
- No burn rate spiral.
AI doesn't reduce the need for human curation; AI increases it — and this is heavily overlooked and underserved. If you've been looking for a business model immune to AI's destructive tendencies — or even fueled by them, this is it. Founders who position themselves now will build businesses that grow not despite AI, but because of it.